Maurice
Baring (1874–1945) – poet, novelist, playwright, essayist,
critic, and all-round man of letters – rather reminds one of what
E. M. Forster wrote about the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy – namely,
that he stood “at a slight angle to the universe”. Baring seems
to have had a similar oblique quality.

A
member of the Baring banking family, he was born into the aristocracy
(his father was the first Lord Revelstoke and his mother the
grand-daughter of the second Earl Grey) and also into immense wealth
and privilege – so much so that Emma Letley’s account of his
early years (“The Enchanted Land (1874-1898)”) has an atmosphere
of almost magical fantasy about it, like Alain-Fournier’s novel, Le
Grand Meaulnes. It conjures up a world that has vanished so
completely that it might never have existed: a slightly unreal,
paradisal world of great country houses, exquisitely tasteful
surroundings, extravagant parties, aristocratic families, beautiful
women, elegant gentlemen, and, by today’s more egalitarian
standards, a somewhat sybaritic opulence. As was customary in his
family, Baring was schooled at Eton, and then proceeded to Cambridge
and Oxford successively, despite his inability to grasp even the
rudiments of Mathematics. The best private tutors that money could
buy were unable to remedy this defect. How he managed to get accepted
at Cambridge, and then at Oxford, is not satisfactorily explained,
but the fact that he was so well connected cannot have hurt his
chances.

Baring’s
innumeracy meant that he was unsuited to enter the family business.
After university, he led for several years a checkered existence,
first as a diplomatic attaché, and later as a journalist. He was
generously supported financially by his elder brother and other
family members, which meant that he was able to live lavishly and
indulge his penchant for irresponsible (and sometimes very expensive)
schoolboy pranks, in spite of his own modest (or non-existent)
earnings. On formal occasions, he wore clothes of the best quality,
he smoked a special brand of cigarettes which could be procured only
from a particular tobacconist in London, he dined at the finest
restaurants, and his habits in general were far from frugal. Letley
records that

Though unpaid [as a diplomatic attaché], Maurice was […] habitually extravagant. […] He became addicted to “the expensive craze of constructing anthologies for himself by the simple process of cutting favourite poems out of hundreds of books and periodicals and pasting them in admirably bound manuscript books.” The books so compiled he called “gepack” (luggage) and there were two types – Heavy Luggage and Light Luggage; as soon as one volume was complete, it would be given to a (generally) delighted recipient and another one started. Best known of the gepack is the published anthology, Have You Anything to Declare? (1936).

It
is difficult to speak of such things without seeming envious or
censorious, but one cannot, in good conscience, approve of the sort
of insouciance that leads to the vandalizing of books or the breaking
of all the plates and glasses after a riotous party. It recalls
Evelyn Waugh’s caustic gibe about “English county families baying
for broken glass”. Only people born into the wealthiest stratum of
society are, or can afford to be, so thoughtlessly wasteful and
destructive.

In
1909, Baring converted to Roman Catholicism from his previous
agnosticism. He never discussed his conversion either before or
afterwards, saying only that it was “the only action in my life
which I am quite certain I have never regretted.” The most personal
literary account he has left us of this critically important
decision, is in the beautiful sonnet sequence “Vita nuova”.

As
a poet, Baring was certainly not a modernist, but neither was he
prone to the artificial archaisms of the Georgian poets. The best of
his poems (and there are not a few of them) combine directness and
simplicity of diction with delicacy of feeling and subtlety of
expression. They have a classical restraint, owing partly to the
poet’s technical mastery of verse forms, and partly to their
understated quality, which is rare in the poetry of any language.
Here, for example, are some lines he called “Stop-Shorts”,
explaining that “Stop-Shorts are Chinese poems in four lines. They
are called Stop-Shorts because the sense goes on when the sound
stops”:

STOP-SHORTS

The
lake is growing grey: the lotus flower

Remains
yet roseate with the sunset hour.

The
moon has climbed above the mountain’s rim:

The
water shines: the lotus flower is dim.

*

The mist is on the sky and sea, a veil:

And in the silver stuff a russet sail.

*

I waited for you all the dark night long,

And listen lonely to the sky-lark’s song.

*

The twilight is not darker than the day,

And pipes are playing somewhere far away.

*

Here once a thousand men in battle died,

Where the red clover grows by the wayside.

This
elegiac note is something we encounter often in Baring’s poetry; in
fact, it occurs in nearly all his work, in prose as well as in verse.

Baring
travelled widely and possessed a remarkable facility for languages,
speaking French, Italian, German, Russian and Danish, fluently, and
being able to read in several other languages. He became an authority
on Russia and Russian literature, and wrote extensively on both
subjects. An insightful, discriminating critic, he was probably the
first Western writer to recognize the genius of Dostoevsky. [1] But,
unlikely as it seems, it was in the Great War of 1914–18 that
Baring really came into his own. Though apparently utterly unsuited
to the discipline of military life, he served with the Royal Flying
Corps with such distinction that his commanding officer, Colonel Hugh
Trenchard,[2] who had initially doubted Baring’s suitability for
service in the RFC, wrote after Baring’s death, “He was the most
unselfish man I have ever met or am likely to meet. The Flying Corps
owed to this man much more than they know or think.” Letley records
that

General Foch summed up the extraordinary career of this unlikely soldier: “there never was a staff officer in any country, in any nation, or in any century, like Major Maurice Baring.”

During
the war, Baring lost many close friends. Afterwards, he realized that
the war had taken its toll of him. His health was poor and he felt
exhausted. Although he was only 44 years old, he described himself as
“a bald-headed half-blind crock with half his inside cut out and an
inflamed bladder and an inflated prostate gland and in perpetual
danger of colitis.” After the war, like many who survived, he seems
to have been haunted by a sense of loss and a pervasive melancholy
which he hid under a mask composed, in equal parts, of upper-class
English reserve and good manners, and the propensity for
light-hearted jokes and witty banter that had always been one of his
chief characteristics. But the sadness found an outlet in what now
became his main occupation – the writing of fiction.

Baring’s
novels have never been popular either with the general reading public
or with academics and intellectuals, but he has always found a few
discerning admirers. It is not hard to account for this. The novels
evoke and recapture the mood and manners of a bygone age: the age
when he was young and still inhabiting “the enchanted land”. To
the Bloomsbury intellectuals, they seemed old fashioned. To
academics, they seemed out of tune with the Modern Movement and
therefore uninteresting. But for writers and readers who were
indifferent to changing fashions and the moods of the moment, their
perfect taste, psychological subtlety, and deceptive simplicity of
manner, exerted a peculiar charm. Letley quotes André Maurois as
saying of C. (one of Baring’s best-known novels) that “he had
found comparable pleasure only in the work of Proust and Tolstoy”.
Baring’s novels were translated into several European languages,
and were more admired and widely read on the Continent, especially in
France, than they were in England. François Mauriac thought that the
English underestimated Baring, commenting astutely: “What I most
admire about [Baring’s novels] is the sense he gives you of the
penetration of grace – without making you aware of it”: a verdict
which, when the actor and writer Robert Speaight communicated it to
Baring, left him too moved to speak. Virginia Woolf, on the other
hand, dismissed C. as “second rate art”, professed herself “quite
unable” to read Baring’s novels, and called them “pallid and
meretricious” – although if, as she claimed, she was unable to
read them, one wonders on what she based her criticism.

Baring
was a typical product of his cultural and familial background, which
is to say that he was highly civilized, a thorough gentleman (he was
incapable of being ill-mannered, whatever the provocation), and
possessed a cultivated taste in all the arts. He was conversant with
Latin and Greek, as well as the modern European languages already
mentioned, and he was widely read in the literatures of all those
languages. He was acquainted with the history of civilizations.
However, he wore his learning lightly and was avowedly
anti-intellectual. This cannot have commended him to the members of
the liberal Bloomsbury Group, who were self-consciously intellectual
and wore their learning on their sleeves: it seems there was no point
in being clever and well-educated unless you let everyone else know
just how clever and well-educated you were.[3]

The
Baring who emerges from Letley’s biography is a man of surprising
contradictions: a scion of the upper classes and a lover of luxury
who preferred to travel third class because it allowed him to meet
and talk to ordinary people; someone born into the aristocracy whose
salient characteristics included modesty and humility; a man of
extravagant habits who was described by his commanding officer as
“the most unselfish man I have ever met”; a man who unaffectedly
enjoyed the company of beautiful, intelligent, and sophisticated
women, but who wrote only of disappointment in love, and of whom his
friend, Lady Diana Cooper, said that she doubted whether any woman
had ever been in love with him; an intellectual who was
anti-intellectual; an inveterate joker who concealed beneath his
japery a profound sadness; a gregarious man who was self-effacing and
lived a solitary life; a lover of children (by whom he was adored)
who had none of his own; a subtle, allusive writer who never outgrew
his schoolboy love of slapstick; and a devout Catholic who never
discussed religion with anyone outside the Church.[4] If, per
impossibile, one could conceive an amalgam of P. G. Wodehouse,
Monsignor Ronald Knox, and Henry James, one would come close to
capturing the essence of Maurice Baring.

In
the last ten years of Baring’s life, he suffered from Parkinson’s
Disease: a cross he bore with a quiet, uncomplaining fortitude at
which all who witnessed it marvelled. From August 1940 until his
death on 14 December 1945, Baring lived as a “loved and honoured
guest” at the Highland home, on the island of Eilean Aigas, of
Laura Lady Lovat, the last of his “Beauties”. She later wrote of
Baring’s last year that

With
the end of the summer he seemed to grow more remote from the events
of this world, except those which affected his immediate
surroundings; for these his sympathy and care never varied, and if
possible increased. But the problems of the world’s agony he felt
could now be left only to its Creator.

Baring’s
old commanding officer, Hugh Trenchard, wrote his obituary in The
Times. A man not given to exaggeration, he wrote of Baring that
he was “truly the best character I ever knew” and that his spirit
would live on “especially in the Air Force – I feel that there
will be thousands waiting to welcome him on the other side.” Conrad
Russell,[5] another close friend, observed to Lady Diana Cooper that
“no man ever got such praise as Maurice got from Trenchard. I was
very glad. It’s strange to think that Maurice’s real claim to
greatness may be as a staff officer – not as a man of letters.”

From
time to time, admirers of Baring’s work have prophesied that, one
day, there will be a revival of interest in him, and he will at last
be given his due as one of the finest writers of his age. Perhaps
they are right. But their hopes may be disappointed, and Baring might
remain one of those unlucky writers who are destined to be admired by
a few and ignored by the many. In Emma Letley, his great-niece, he
has at least found a worthy biographer and an eloquent apologist. The
last word should be left to her. She concludes her biography thus:

It was not surprising that at Farm Street [6] there was “little sorrow” now that “the martyrdom of Maurice Baring was over and those who mourned were mourning their own last hope of seeing once again, in this life, their incomparable friend”.

Notes

[1]
The brilliant Constance Garnett translations had not then appeared:
Baring read Dostoevsky in the original Russian.

[2]
Hugh Trenchard was a colonel when Baring first knew him. He later
became Marshal of the Royal Air Force, 1st Viscount Trenchard GCB,
OM, GCVO, DSO. He has been described as “the Father of the Royal
Air Force”.

[3]
I suspect that Baring would have regarded the Bloomsburys’
intellectual ostentation and addiction to one-upmanship as “not
quite the thing” – but would have been too well-bred to say so.

[4]
Baring adjured Belloc to “never, never, never talk theology or
discuss the Church with those outside it. People simply do not
understand what you are talking about and they merely (a) get angry
and (b) come to the conclusion that one doesn’t believe in the
thing oneself and that one is simply doing it to annoy.”

[5]
Conrad Russell (1878–1947) was an English farmer and letter writer.
He is remembered today chiefly for his humorous correspondence with
some of the most celebrated society beauties of his time. He was a
cousin of the philosopher, Bertrand Russell, and is not be confused
with the latter’s sons, John Conrad Russell (1921–1987) and
Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell (1937–2004). Evelyn Waugh called
him “one of the most exquisitely entertaining men I have known”.

[6]
The site of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, which is run by
the Society of Jesus in Mayfair, central London. References to “Farm
Street” are generally understood to mean the headquarters of the
Jesuits in England.